Science,
after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.
—Samuel Butler

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
writing in the mid-twentieth century, declared the world's nascent
telecommunications infrastructure "a generalized nervous
system" that was giving the human species an "organic
unity." Increasingly, humankind constituted a
"super-brain," a "brain of brains." The more tightly
people were woven into this cerebral tissue, the closer they came to
humanity's divinely appointed destiny, "Point Omega."

What exactly was Point
Omega? Hard to say. Teilhard's philosophical writings are notable about
equally for their poetry and their obscurity. As best I can make out, at
Point Omega the human species would constitute a kind of giant organic
brotherly-love blob.

Teilhard's superiors in
the Catholic Church hewed to a more conventional theology. They
forcefully encouraged Teilhard, a trained paleontologist, to confine his
published pronouncements to the subject of fossils.

After Teilhard's death in
I955, his most cosmic writings were finally published. They generated
buzz in some avant-garde circles, but they never gained mainstream
acceptance, either in the church or the wider world. Why? In part
because his notions of how evolution works were mushy and mystical, and
never earned the respect of the scientific establishment. In part
because Point Omega meshed so poorly with extant theology. And in part,
perhaps, because comparing societies to organisms had not-so-long-ago
been a pastime of European fascists, who had justified murder and
repression in the name of superorganic vigor.

It's amazing how fast a
viewpoint can move from radical to trite. Today, with fascism seeming
like an ancient relic, and the Internet looking strikingly neural, talk
of a giant global brain is cheap. But there's a difference. These days,
most people who talk this way are speaking loosely. Tim Berners-Lee, who
invented the World Wide Web, has noted parallels between the Web and the
structure of the brain, but he insists that "global brain" is
a mere metaphor. Teilhard de Chardin, in contrast, seems to have been
speaking literally: humankind was coming to constitute an actual brain—like
the one in your head, except bigger.

Certainly there are more
people today than in Teilhard's day who take the idea of a global brain
literally. But they reside where Teilhard resided: on the fringe of
opinion.

Are they crazy? Was
Teilhard crazy? Not as crazy as you might think. And once you understand
how relatively non-crazy it is to call humankind a giant brain, other
aspects of Teilhard's worldview begin to look less crazy as well. Such
as: the idea that there is a point to this whole exercise; the idea that
life on earth exists for a purpose, and that the purpose is becoming
manifest.

I'm not saying these
things are true at least, I'm not saying it confidently, the way I've
been saying that organic history and human history have a direction. I'm
just saying these things can't be dismissed with a wave of the hand.
They don't violate the foundations of scientific thought, and they even
gain a kind of support, here and there, from modern science.

ARE WE AN
ORGANISM?

There are various reasons
that, at first glance, you might be skeptical of this giant global brain
business. One is that a real, literal brain belongs to a real, literal
organism. And the human species isn't an organism; it is a bunch of
organisms. But before dismissing the possibility that a bunch of
organisms can themselves constitute an organism, we should at least get
clear on the definition of an organism. That turns out to be harder than
it sounds.

Consider the
"colonial invertebrates." As Edward O. Wilson has noted, some
come close to qualifying as "perfect societies"—so close,in fact, that "the colony can equally well be called an
organism." The awesome, sixty-foot-long Portuguese man-of-war, for
example, certainly looks like an organism—like a giant, colorful
jellyfish—and indeed is usually called an organism. But it evolved
through the merger of distinct multicelled organisms, which grew more
specialized as they grew more interdependent: some paralyze fish, others
eat the fish and then share the nutrients. Among other colonial
invertebrates that blur the line between organism and society are our
old friend the cellular slime mold (which vacillates between autonomous
cells and unified slug) and corals (including, aptly, the "brain
coral").

For that matter, even
things that we all agree are organisms—such as ourselves—can have
their colonial aspects. Remember the discussion of our cells and our
organelles—formerly distinct creatures that merged? There is a little
Portuguese man-of-war in all of us.

Indeed, as we've seen,
cells and organelles have not only distinct roots, but distinct routes:
different pathways that their genes take into the next generation, and
hence somewhat different Darwinian interests. The organelle's DNA,
relying on maternal transmission, might profit by biasing reproduction
in favor of females—and in some plant species it does exactly that. So
one criterion you'd think might serve as a clear-cut distinction between
organism and society—complete unity of purpose among the organism's
constituents—won't work.

In fact, even if we leave
organelles aside, and look only at the nuclear genes—at the
chromosomes constituting the genome all is not peace, love, and
understanding. The reason is that, though the genes in a genome would
appear to be in the same boat, there is a brief but crucial period when
they aren't. When it comes time to send a boat to the next generation—when
an egg cell is created and sets sail hopefully—half of the genes must
be left behind, to make room for genes that come from the sperm.
Likewise, only half of a male's genes will, via sperm, make it into that
egg during fertilization. As a rule, genes are assigned to eggs in an
even-handed way, so that a given gene, whether from male or female, has
a fifty-fifty chance of winding up in a given intergenerational boat.
But if a gene could find a way to bias the assignment process, placing
itself in most or all of the boats, it might proliferate by natural
selection.

This has actually happened—in
mice and fruit flies and, no doubt, other, less studied species. A type
of gene called a "segregation distorter" has only one apparent
function: distorting segregation—slanting the sorting process so that
it can sneak onto the intergenerational ship time and time again. It is
a professional stowaway.

There is also a bigger
genetic stowaway—a whole chromosome called a B chromosome that appears
in lots of organisms, including people. Like a stowaway who steals food
from the crew at night, a B chromosome is a parasite; it can hurt the
organism's chances of reproducing, delaying the onset of fertility in
females. But from the point of view of genes on the B chromosome, that's
okay; if they slightly reduce the number of ships that set sail, but
manage to sneak onto all of them, they will do better than genes that
play by the rules, getting excluded from half of the ships. It is these
law-abiding genes that suffer from the shrinkage of the overall fleet.

Generally speaking,
law-abiding genes do a good job of solving such problems—preserving
the rule of law, foiling would-be parasites in various ways. The reason
is that if they don't solve such problems, and parasitism runs rampant,
natural selection casts the whole lot of them aside parasites and law
abiders alike—in favor of genes that run a tighter ship. (In cultural
evolution, analogously, societies that don't solve the "trust"
problem, that don't discourage rampant parasitism, have tended to lose
out to societies that do.) This ability of selection at the level of the
organism to override selection at the level of the gene is the reason
these examples of conflict of interest within an organism are, in the
scheme of things, small potatoes. Even people with parasitic B
chromosomes—around one in fifty of the people you see each day—have
an air of organic unity about them.

Still, the fact remains
that one of the things you might expect to be a clear, bright line
between society and organism—internal unity of purpose--isn't clear or
bright. As the zoologist Matt Ridley has put it, "What is the
organism? There is no such thing." Each so-called organism, he
notes, "is a collective." And not a wholly harmonious
collective at least, not by definition.

If the line between
organism and society isn't the distinction between complete and
incomplete unity of purpose, then what is the
line? That's the problem: lacking a clear boundary, biologists are free
to differ. In 1911the great
entomologist William Morton Wheeler published a paper called "The
ant colony as an organism"—a title that, he stressed, was not
meant as mere analogy...

[SNIP]

An excerpt from Nonzero:
The Logic of Human Destiny, By Robert Wright, published by Pantheon
Books. Copyright 2000 by Robert Wright. www.nonzero.org